5 ms·

I don't know what you are referring to, but there's nothing magical about nostr here. You're identity is a public key. It's not tied to a particular server. So

by Touche 4y ago

I don't know what you are referring to, but there's nothing magical about nostr here. You're identity is a public key. It's not tied to a particular server. So if a server boots you off you can continue publishing on other servers using the same public key. It's common to publish to multiple servers at the same time. That's really it, servers have less authority in nostr, and that's why it's more resistant to censorship.

acdha 4y ago
Okay, so let’s keep thinking about this a little: if your concern is being censored by the government, all servers are required to follow the law so this only helps to the extent that the government chooses not to or is unable to enforce it. If your concern is private, if this were to find some kind of use you’d inevitably see shared blocklists just as we’ve seen for things like email spam. That’s a really important thing to study for any distributed system because “censorship resistant” inevitably means “full of spam, malware, and illegal content” unless you’re very careful designing some compromise to prevent that (e.g. IPFS mirroring is opt-in, so an innocent node owner doesn’t wake up to the FBI knocking their door in). In the case of GitHub, anyone who wants to self-host an alternative can do so for only the cost of their time & modest app hosting resources running Gitlab, Gitea, etc. That raises the question of where this offer is coming from: there isn’t a notable problem with censorship on GitHub for otherwise legal content, so you’re mostly talking about things which are actually illegal and that means that something like Nostr isn’t changing the picture much because everything already is decentralized. If the Tornado Cash guys are on a block list, Nostr server owners are going to have legal demands to block their keys, too, just as a hosting company would get a take-down for a private GitLab instance.
- rektide 4y ago
  The current distribution mechanisms (wonderful softwares like gitea) let people mirror, but if the primary host goes down there's no easy fall-over. If governments do try to get things removed on Nostr they're going to have a much much harder time. Folks can re-pop-up on different relays. Governments can keep playing whack-a-mole but I have hard time seeing they'll have any success. Your post makes it sound like a government can snap it's fingers & every relay will magically stop carrying content: that seems wildly out of touch to me, seems to be way different from what I'd expect when this situation crops up. Not needing to host is a critical change of the game here, in my view.
  - acdha 4y ago
    > The current distribution mechanisms (wonderful softwares like gitea) let people mirror, but if the primary host goes down there's no easy fall-over. The DNS system is decentralized and updates take seconds. We’ve seen this for decades with things like open source projects when someone gets tired of hosting it. > Your post makes it sound like a government can snap it's fingers & every relay will magically stop carrying content: that seems wildly out of touch to me Look at what happened with the TornadoCash guys — once legal action was taken, how many exchanges would allow transactions to or from their addresses? This would be similar: once enough people start using it, someone will do something illegal, and then governments are going to start telling server operators in their jurisdictions to stop allowing that traffic if they don’t want to be charged as accessories. Since those guys don’t want to go to jail or have their servers packed up by federal marshals, they’ll figure out whatever is necessary to block certain keys. Something like Nostr might make it slightly easier to replicate things or provide a less antiquated key management system than GPG but it won’t be a game-changer but an incremental improvement at best. I think this effort here is both overstating the problem of using GitHub and understating the challenges of replacing it. People use GitHub because running servers is a chore they don’t want to deal with. Relatively few people are donating hosting and the ones who do generally aren’t interested in hosting the few types of content which GitHub bans, either. They’re certainly not going to go to jail rather than help the police who tracked something illegal to their IPs.
    - rektide 4y ago
      I don't feel like your recognizing a ton of really obvious differences. DNS is hardly a good shield for dealing with potential takedowns. It seems obviously true for a variety of reasons, including some mandated takedowns at the centralized DNS layer itself. Relays obviously allow a vault potentially infinitely replicated way means for unhosting that simply lacks many good modern parallels. TornadoCash again seems radically different from anything we are talking about, simply because it is so heavily in the highly regulatory financial regime, in a way that Nostro simply isn't. The government never really had to step in; the threat of it maybe having to made everyone change their tune very fast. And there just were very very very few actual decision makers involved. Nostr is far more decentralized in practice, even though the number of users is much lower than cryptocoin stuff. Elsewhere I've agreed that replacing GitHub is really really hard & long work, & I've pined for us to take smaller steps rather than make such big totalizing attempts. But I think you don't really grasp the unhosting ideas& advantage. And you seem unwilling to deem any attempt worth starting. At some point the feelings against big centralized social networks leads us to trying new things, but I mostly read fatalistic why try from your people-dont-want-to-host-things, even though Nostr's whole point is to make being a relay at small interpersonal scales reslly easy, without having to tackle the hard big-scale computing hosting challenges. And if your relay goes down,... so what? Your small unhosted network is there.

by Touche 4y ago

acdha 4y ago

Okay, so let’s keep thinking about this a little: if your concern is being censored by the government, all servers are required to follow the law so this only helps to the extent that the government chooses not to or is unable to enforce it. If your concern is private, if this were to find some kind of use you’d inevitably see shared blocklists just as we’ve seen for things like email spam. That’s a really important thing to study for any distributed system because “censorship resistant” inevitably means “full of spam, malware, and illegal content” unless you’re very careful designing some compromise to prevent that (e.g. IPFS mirroring is opt-in, so an innocent node owner doesn’t wake up to the FBI knocking their door in). In the case of GitHub, anyone who wants to self-host an alternative can do so for only the cost of their time & modest app hosting resources running Gitlab, Gitea, etc. That raises the question of where this offer is coming from: there isn’t a notable problem with censorship on GitHub for otherwise legal content, so you’re mostly talking about things which are actually illegal and that means that something like Nostr isn’t changing the picture much because everything already is decentralized. If the Tornado Cash guys are on a block list, Nostr server owners are going to have legal demands to block their keys, too, just as a hosting company would get a take-down for a private GitLab instance.

rektide 4y ago
The current distribution mechanisms (wonderful softwares like gitea) let people mirror, but if the primary host goes down there's no easy fall-over. If governments do try to get things removed on Nostr they're going to have a much much harder time. Folks can re-pop-up on different relays. Governments can keep playing whack-a-mole but I have hard time seeing they'll have any success. Your post makes it sound like a government can snap it's fingers & every relay will magically stop carrying content: that seems wildly out of touch to me, seems to be way different from what I'd expect when this situation crops up. Not needing to host is a critical change of the game here, in my view.
- acdha 4y ago
  > The current distribution mechanisms (wonderful softwares like gitea) let people mirror, but if the primary host goes down there's no easy fall-over. The DNS system is decentralized and updates take seconds. We’ve seen this for decades with things like open source projects when someone gets tired of hosting it. > Your post makes it sound like a government can snap it's fingers & every relay will magically stop carrying content: that seems wildly out of touch to me Look at what happened with the TornadoCash guys — once legal action was taken, how many exchanges would allow transactions to or from their addresses? This would be similar: once enough people start using it, someone will do something illegal, and then governments are going to start telling server operators in their jurisdictions to stop allowing that traffic if they don’t want to be charged as accessories. Since those guys don’t want to go to jail or have their servers packed up by federal marshals, they’ll figure out whatever is necessary to block certain keys. Something like Nostr might make it slightly easier to replicate things or provide a less antiquated key management system than GPG but it won’t be a game-changer but an incremental improvement at best. I think this effort here is both overstating the problem of using GitHub and understating the challenges of replacing it. People use GitHub because running servers is a chore they don’t want to deal with. Relatively few people are donating hosting and the ones who do generally aren’t interested in hosting the few types of content which GitHub bans, either. They’re certainly not going to go to jail rather than help the police who tracked something illegal to their IPs.
  - rektide 4y ago
    I don't feel like your recognizing a ton of really obvious differences. DNS is hardly a good shield for dealing with potential takedowns. It seems obviously true for a variety of reasons, including some mandated takedowns at the centralized DNS layer itself. Relays obviously allow a vault potentially infinitely replicated way means for unhosting that simply lacks many good modern parallels. TornadoCash again seems radically different from anything we are talking about, simply because it is so heavily in the highly regulatory financial regime, in a way that Nostro simply isn't. The government never really had to step in; the threat of it maybe having to made everyone change their tune very fast. And there just were very very very few actual decision makers involved. Nostr is far more decentralized in practice, even though the number of users is much lower than cryptocoin stuff. Elsewhere I've agreed that replacing GitHub is really really hard & long work, & I've pined for us to take smaller steps rather than make such big totalizing attempts. But I think you don't really grasp the unhosting ideas& advantage. And you seem unwilling to deem any attempt worth starting. At some point the feelings against big centralized social networks leads us to trying new things, but I mostly read fatalistic why try from your people-dont-want-to-host-things, even though Nostr's whole point is to make being a relay at small interpersonal scales reslly easy, without having to tackle the hard big-scale computing hosting challenges. And if your relay goes down,... so what? Your small unhosted network is there.